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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Thousands of Tesco customers were unable to order food yesterday after the chain’s website crashed.
Britain’s biggest grocer was forced to say sorry when a glitch locked families out of their shopping lists.
One fed-up customer told the Mirror: “I tried for more than two hours and then gave up and switched to another supermarket because I needed a certain time slot for my shopping.”

With customers unable to order groceries and others booted off its Tesco Direct ­catalogue, experts said lost sales could add up to £1million over 24 hours.

Tesco is estimated to make £255million a year from online sales alone.

GLITCH

The Tesco.com site went down at around 1pm and while Tesco Direct was back up again two hours later, IT engineers were still working flat out to fix the grocery shopping site.

Shoppers trying to log on were told: “We’re very sorry. The Tesco.com grocery website is currently undergoing improvement works.

“It will be up and running shortly so please try again.”

A statement from the ­supermarket giant blamed a technical fault.

It said: “This is a rare glitch which has affected some of our online operations. We are working hard to fix it.”

Tesco websites have been plagued by computer ­problems in recent months.

In June, angry savers threatened to dump Tesco Bank after a similar crash left them without access to their cash for three days.

And before Christmas, customers trying to cash in Clubcard vouchers ahead of a deadline were shut out after the site went down.